by The Rev. Rev. Stephen B. Snider sbsnider@home.com
It began with a trip this spring up to Danvers and Salem, Massachusetts – what a treat for a history buff to live in the ‘northeast corridor’ of the country in the midst of so much of our nation’s past – to see and feel the formative experiences of earlier generations. What began as our tourist exploration of Salem’s witchcraft frenzy of the 1690’s led to the rediscovery of the social commentary on the mid-1800’s by Salem’s famous son, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
While walking through Salem, a happenstance turn toward the town’s early piers put us in front of 54 Turner Street and the entrance to the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne, who added the ‘w’ to his name to divorce himself from the ancestral Hathorne judge who presided at witch trials, used this old and marvelous home as the basis for the book which Henry James called, “the closest approach we are likely to have to the Great American Novel.” Published in 1851, Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables is at once fiction and reality. The Pyncheon family exists in Hawthorne’s imagination because he sees in each member the social, political and ethical realities of his own time and place.
The only thing I remember about the book when I first read it in junior high was that it was required reading. Following a tour of the house, I bought it and read it again. How much more fascinating the book is, now. It could stand alone on any library shelf under the subject of ‘what goes round … comes round’. Listen, for example, how Hawthorne writes about Hepzibah and Clifford – for so long recluses in the old mansion – as they make for themselves the courageous decision to venture out and perhaps attend church: “’Hepzibah,’ asked Clifford … ‘do you ever go to church?’ ‘No, Clifford!’ she replied. ‘Not in these many years!’ ‘Were I to be there,’ he rejoined, ‘it seems to me that I could pray once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!’ …. ‘Dear brother,’ said she, earnestly, ‘let us go! We belong nowhere. We have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and forsaken as we are, some pew door will be opened to us!’” They dressed for church, looked at each other, and stepped bravely across the threshold of the old house they had been afraid to leave for too many years. And they did not go to church. Outside, alone and lost in their own community which regarded them as misfits – as too different – going to church became too great a risk. Do I … can I belong? Hepzibah and Clifford answered that question when they turned around in despair and stepped back into the loneliness of the gabled house.
What goes round … comes round? One hundred fifty years later, we all
know someone – maybe we are that someone – wanting a community with which
to pray but too afraid to appear … too afraid to be regarded as a misfit.
Perhaps we are brave enough – loving enough – to say to them, “We are all
misfits. Yet we say our prayers to God through one who loves us … one who
was regarded as a misfit , too.” Hepzibah and Clifford live among us today,
children of God, longing for, yet anxious about, the welcome they might
receive. Do you know them? Sure you do. In the deepest part of ourselves,
we are them and they are us. Just as God would have it. I hope and pray
our Church’s General Convention meeting this month in Denver understands
that. SBS
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